Páginas

jueves, 21 de abril de 2016

The Earth's Adventures

We are sharing a new outcome by a team from the Master's degree in Bilingual Education at Primary Education Schools at the Rey Juan Carlos University. In their subject related to use of ICT in the CLIL classroom, they were asked to participate in this InfoEduGraphic project by their teacher, and here are the results:
For this task they had to work in groups to create an InfoEdufoGraphic. The members of this group are: @lainez_ortega, @cristinarisueno, @GMEstrellaa and @gonzaalo10.To do this they surfed the InfoEduGraphic Project Site to look for tips, instructions and ideas. Since all their e-projects (Planets in the Solar System, The Hydrosphere, Environmental care, The Mysteries of Earth) are connected with Social Science (planets, Earth, landscapes and so forth), they decided to make an infographic as an introductory tool for a common topic. Their main learning outcome is for their students to know about the planets of the Solar System, The Earth`s layers (Hydrosphere and atmosphere) and landforms as well as environmental care.

First they assigned the roles:

@GMEstrellaa was the coordinator. She had to direct and check that each member did his part of the job. She also encouraged us to keep working on the infographic.- @gonzaalo10was the supervisor and he was in charge of controlling the creation process and remembering each person's task. He also had to take notes of everybody's ideas.

- Finally, (@celiagon92) was the speaker. This is why she is the one spreading their work at Twitter and through this blog, as well as her classmates'.

To accomplish this task, they had to face two problems:

How to link all their e-projects contents: After thinking about it for a while, they decided to structure the infoedugraphic from the most asbtract content (the space) to the most concrete one (landforms). This way, we could include all our Social Science contents in a structured and well-organised way. In order to motivate their students, they added a badge that they could get once they finished the learning process.

How to adapt the contents to the different school levels: this challenge was harder to face but finally they thought of making an interactive InfoEduGraphic. What does this mean? They did not only design an infographic (which is an image) but also an interactive image. By doing this, they foster an active learning and allow students of different grades to access to different activities of different difficulty. The teacher could guide all this learning process to do the activities corresponding to each course.

They decided to use the tool Piktochart due to the fact that some members of their group had already used it and they said that it could fit the purpose of the project perfectly. It gives you the possibility to create infographics, posters, presentations or reports depending on what you need. The one they chose is an infographic as it is divided into different blocks which were suitable for each difficulty level. The quality of the pictures and icons that the tool offers is quite high and very attractive, exactly what they were looking for: to captivate students’ attention. Finally, they would like to highlight that Picktochart would be perfect if it offered the possibility of making those graphics interactive (pictures with movements, sounds, links to other webpages and so on) instead of being just an image.

Once they had their infographic finished they went on to make it interactive to promote active learning and to increase pupils' motivation. They did this part of the project using the online tool

Thing Link. With this tool you can make an interactive image by putting links in small spots inside your picture. Therefore, they included a video to expand knowledge, interactive activities to review each content and an Arts and Crafts activity about environmental care.

As you can imagine, this tool is inreadibly useful to create your own CLIL materials because, by linking resources, you can work the 4Cs. However, they think this tool would be nicer if it offered a wider variety of forms to insert the links, not only spots.

From this task, they can conclude that Infographics have a lot of uses in our classrooms. They can be used to introduce content, to review vocabulary, to explain the steps of a process or activity, to help children with special educational needs. Infographics present information in a neat and visual way that can clarify students' doubts. Moreover, students can also create their own infographics to learn about content and ICT skills.
Their final artifact is this amazing interactive InfoEduGraphic to introduce and learn about different contents regarding our planet. Click on the spots to see the activities: https://www.thinglink.com/scene/773107172895621120